Aye I'm holding off myself. Windows 7 is solid around and I don't see any reason to upgrade, especially now since I build a lot of my PCs anyway, and there's still issues that hardware doesn't have signed drivers ready for windows 8 yet. This will change as time goes on, but for now, I'm staying put.

I really don't like their Start screen, so I installed a small program called "Classic Shell" which allows me to by-pass it entirely. Sweet... :)

Another thing I hate is that when you open a picture or a PDF file using their built-in program, it opens full-screen by default and then the only way to go back to the desktop and close the file is by going through the Start Screen first. I don't know if there's any way to change that but it's frickin' annoying... :(

Also another thing for you folks to watch out for if you're buying a prebuilt PC. Apparently there's a new BIOS that's been deployed called the UEFI bios (already saw it on a few Asus boards I installed on friends' compies) that, I guess depending on how it's configured, can lock the operating system to the computer. Long story short, if the computer is pre-installed with windows 8, you can't uninstall it and say downgrade to windows 7 or something, this mostly applies to the big computer names like HP and Dell, but I haven't been able to find if they're deploying "locked" systems with this new bios.

I do not know about the app. But there is a desktop icon/tile that will take you to the regular desktop. You can do everything you did before from there except the start menu. The start screen replaces that. Just right-click in the start menu and you can open all apps which will show all installed programs. You can also right click the start menu and open all apps/programs and set the ones you want so see on startup. Another thing I did was set thing by group and then label the group. So, I have an Autodesk section, MS office section, Development software section, Websites section, and a section for my wife that includes the things she uses.

And to pin things to the task bar on the desktop just right click and chose that option. Not to mention that you pin and unpin items from the start screen that way as well.

To search you just start typing in the start screen and files/folders are searched for things matching what you are looking for.

I am sure that many of you know these things but I was just posting in case some do not. And to add I just insert the disc and install programs just like I did before so really nothing changed there and all the old programs that I used on Windows 7 work. Not to mention that overall Windows 8 is faster than 7 at some things. Boot times for Windows 8 11 seconds, Windows 7 35 seconds on the same system. Maya 2013 renders faster, files compress and decompress faster, and every test I ran on work that I do shows that windows 8 is faster although sometimes only by a few seconds in some cases.

I was happy enough with it in the early days. But now I'm getting "see error log" warnings when there IS NO error log. Seriously, W.T.H!?!

And now, I get all kinds of weird syncing issues where art work isn't found, etc. It's like it has ghosts or something. Plus 11 moves everything around and you can't find anything anymore. Like drag and dropping for your device. :/